12 goodreading ı AUGUST 2006 writing life Photo: Basso Cannarsa banking on boris Before BORIS AKUNIN became Russia’s most bankable novelist, he was a disgruntled editor and critic, busy declaring that fiction is dead. He explained his about-turn to BEN NAPARSTEK. Boris Akunin once took to the pages of Russia’s most high-toned literary jour nal and called on writers to give up fiction. ‘I was arguing that, if you are a writer and you want to tell me something important, don’t hide under fictionalised characters,’ he says now. ‘Just write what you think. If not, please write novels for children or mass literature, which is not worth serious readers.’ A decade on, Akunin is Russia’s most inter nationally famous living novelist. His detective stories of czarist Russia, featuring the dashing sleuth Erast Fandorin, have notched up sales approximating 10 million. He now admits that his polemic against fiction was merely a reflection of his professional malaise. ‘I was poisoned and fed up with reading fiction after fifteen years. It’s like when you’re a kid, you dream of working in a chocolate factory. Then, after a week, you hate chocolate.’ Boris Akunin – penname for Grigory Chkhartishvillihas – is such a hot commodity that the Ukrainian mafia recently put out a counterfeit Fandorin novel, entitled The Rook, in Akunin’s name. ‘First they did it to Dan Brown. I was amused. Then it happened to me and I was not amused at all. Inside it was complete, complete – well, I cannot find a decent word: a text of very poor quality.’ Akunin is everything that the traditional Russian writer- prophet is not. ‘I don’t want to be a teacher of life to my readers. I wouldn’t know what to teach them.’ Writing for a mere two hours at day – ‘I get tired very quickly’ – Akunin spends the rest of his time playing computer games, drinking